motion of the happiness of others; and
2nd, that we could have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior
to a knowledge of God. This trial of course excited the profoundest
feeling among the students, and they actually made a formal appearance
before the Presbytery, and defended their hero zealously both by word
and writing. Smith, being only a bajan--a first year's student--would
play no leading part in these proceedings, but he could not have lived
in the thick of them unmoved, and he certainly--either then or
afterwards, when he entered Hutcheson's class and listened to his
lectures on natural theology, or perhaps attended his private class on
the Sundays for special theological study--adopted the religious
optimism of Hutcheson for his own creed, and continued under its
influence to the last of his days.

In politics also Hutcheson's lectures exercised important practical
influence on the general opinion of his students. The principles of
religious and political liberty were then so imperfectly comprehended
and so little accepted that their advocacy was still something of a
new light, and we are informed by one of Hutcheson's leading
colleagues, Principal Leechman, that none of his lectures made a
deeper or wider impression than his exposition of those principles,
and that very few of his pupils left his hands without being imbued
with some of the same love of liberty which animated their master.
Smith was no exception, and that deep strong love of all reasonable
liberty which characterised him must have been, if not first kindled,
at any rate quickened by his contact with Hutcheson.

Interesting traces of more specific influence remain. Dugald Stewart
seems to have heard Smith himself admit that it was Hutcheson in his
lectures that suggested to him the particular theory of the right of
property which he used to teach in his own unpublished lectures on
jurisprudence, and which founded the right of property on the general
sympathy of mankind with the reasonable expectation of the occupant
to enjoy unmolested the object which he had acquired or discovered.[9]
But it is most probable that his whole theory of moral sentiments was
suggested by the lectures of Hutcheson, perhaps the germs of it even
when he was passing through the class. For Hutcheson in the course of
his lectures expressly raises and discusses the question, Can we
reduce our moral sentiments to sympathy? He answered the question
himself in the ne